April 05, 2012

Though I live in Berkeley, one of my weekly rituals is listening to LA radio station KCRW's Good Food online. I usually save it for when I am cleaning up and need a push toward the finish line, because I know 45 minutes will fly by with Evan Kleiman and friends, and I end up with a sparkling kitchen and a clear head.

Good Food's Market Report segment, in which Amelia Saltsman chats up farmers, purveyors and chefs about ways to use seasonal produce at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, is how I became familiar with LA pastry chef (formerly of Ammo & owner of new restaurant Cooks County) Roxana Jullapat. I love her ideas for seasonal fruit, but became a touch obsessed with making her Hot Cross Buns with Candied Kumquats for Easter. So much so that I bookmarked the recipe in my brain stem for a year.

December 12, 2011

Bakers Dozen has great guest speakers and many IACP and James Beard award winners within its ranks including Flo Braker & Alice Medrich (who were both featured on Baking with Julia) and Chez Panisse pastry chef Lindsey Shere. If you are in the Bay Area, I highly recommend you check it out and join. Sorry about the photos. As you might be able to tell, shades were drawn in the room and even wonderful photographer Paula Eve Aspin only got a few shots. (Thanks Paula!)

Perched on the back bar, I tried to get down as much as I could, but I am only able to capture the highlights here. Yigit is infectiously energetic with a hilarious dry wit, and his patter was turbocharged by the Peet’s coffee sitting next to him, so it was tough to keep up but I had a lot of fun trying. For more proof of Yigit’s funny, follow him on Twitter @YigitPura

The audience was split into two groups that swapped – one group outside with chocolate chip cookies while the other half was inside the Foreign Cinema gallery with a layer cake setup. Distinguished food stylist Denise Vivaldo named a slice of cake and “pretty much anything completely brown” among the Top 10 Hardest Foods to Shoot, so the subjects were well-chosen. Gorgeous fresh fruit desserts would have been too easy. Mother Nature does all the heavy lifting.

To wit, even the shot below of a strawberries & cream cake roll from Jennie Schacht’s Farmers’ Market Desserts that completely misses the cute swirl of the filling looks pretty compared to all thebrown and beige of the cookie box below it. (If you disagree, feel free to leave a comment. I would love to know why!)

March 25, 2011

My father and my grandparents were staying in a motel in Crescent City, California while my grandfather was on a job in 1964. Just a week later, on Good Friday, the motel and everything near it was wiped out by a tsunami triggered by an 8.6 earthquake in Alaska. After watching the events unfold in Japan, I feel incredibly lucky to be here. Sure, Crescent City had a little damage after the Japanese tsunami on March 11 of this year, and someone was swept in the waves, but nothing like the devastation of 1964. And even that pales in comparison to the Japanese tsunami devastation. It's overwhelming.

What started as a tweet from Samin Nosrat for help with a Bay Area bake sale to benefit Japanese disaster relief has turned into a huge event with locations all over California, Austin, Chicago and even Hawaii. Last year Samin organized a sale to benefit Haiti disater relief to which many of my friends contributed that raised over $23,000 (!) and with this sale she hopes raise even more. The logo above comes from the dedicated Bake Sale for Japan website, and is just one of the many goods and services donated by the generous Bay Area food community to this effort. When I last checked, they were interested in donations of both origami paper for folding paper cranes at the sale, as well as volunteers to teach others to fold cranes. Please come join us and show your support for the Japanese affected by this devastating earthquake and tsunami.

When: Saturday, April 2, 2011, 10am-2pm

Where: All over! I will be at the Berkeley sale hosted by Gioia Pizzeria and Monterey Market, but there are locations in Oakland, SF, Santa Cruz for Bay Area folks, and all the other places mentioned above. There are new locations still being added, so check the locations page of the Bake Sale for Japan website for the latest.

If you cannot make the sale, but wish to support the cause, click here to donate to Peace Winds Japan as part of this fundraiser. I believe there will also be donation boxes at the sale to just make a contribution.

February 28, 2011

I am dreaming of my summer vacation. I am sure the entire Northern Hemisphere daydreams of summer this of year. Last year, close friends decided to pack up for Montréal, in the Canadian province of Québec for six months, and invited their friends to visit, and we jumped at the chance. The view above is earned by hiking up Mount Royal in the park of the same name, where it's easy to see that the city of Montréal is really an island surrounded by rivers.

We were there during the end of June, and it felt like everyone was on the street making the most of the long, warm days, appreciating them with fervent enthusiasm after Quebec's cold, dark winter. I loved visiting in summer.

Then again, with a city full of rivers and lakes that freeze beautifully for skating, amazing and affordable food scene which Bon Appetit rightly pegged "part Paris, part Portland", and francophone culture without the cost of flying over the Atlantic, I would love visiting in winter, too.

We were there during the brief fresh red currant season.

Also, I have no photo of the best thing we ate in Montréal, because our nose led us there after getting in at 7:30am and walking our bags from the Mont-Royal metro station. You MUST have the Koiugn-Amman at Patisserie Kouing-Amman. Yes, that Kouign-Amman .

December 29, 2010

This photo tells you most of what you need to know about this cake: bright, clear lemon mixed with flavorful turbinado sugar form the base of this cake, which is Rose's favorite non-chocolate cake in Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

This cake doesn't look like a whole lot. Its plain golden brown appearance belies the depth of flavor inside. You wouldn't know it from the dearth of lemon recipes I have featured on this website, but lemon is likely my favorite ingredient in the whole kitchen. I love Greek, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food, so I use lemon almost everyday in my savory cooking, lemon meringue pie (when done well) is my favorite dessert, and I love lemon curd so much, I teach it in classes as my favorite way to use up egg yolks.

Long story long, I knew I would love this cake from the beginning, and Rose was right.

December 16, 2010

I know we are close to the end of apple season, but there are still plenty of apples at the farmers' markets near me, so I hope to convince you to find some you like and make Jennie Schacht's recipe Baked Apple Dumplings with Cinnamon Caramel Sauce from Farmers' Market Desserts (which was just featured on David Lebovitz' Favorite Cookbooks of 2010!!). Make them for any reason, but these dumplings scream dinner party; they would be the perfect fall or winter dessert for a gathering of 6-8 people (the recipe as written makes 6 dumplings, so adjust accordingly). Though I tested many recipes from Farmers' Market Desserts, the baked apple dumplings were far and away the most popular with my testers, a fact I find important in passing along with a time or labor-intensive recipe. Don't you always wonder if the effort is worth it?

November 15, 2010

Just dropping by to check in with the Heavenly Cake Bakers (HCB), a group of us baking our way through Rose Levy Beranbaum's book Rose's Heavenly Cakes. Oh, I had such a long list of things to make from the book for the next free choice week, because I have been busy planning the launch of Milkglass Baking and have missed some of the ones I was most eager to try. But this week came along, and the occasion (with a chocolate allergy providing a wonderful constraint in which to create) simply demanded I repeat the fabulous Pumpkin Cake, but this time conquering the Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream. There are a lot of components to this buttercream, including Creme Anglaise and Italian Meringue, which are combined with softened butter and orange. (I used the zest and reduced juice of the wonderful Mandarin Oranges from my CSA, Terra Firma Farm, with a few drops of orange oil.) While this buttercream ranks high for flavor with its notes of caramel and citrus, it is rather labor (and dish) intensive for a buttercream. But I am glad I finally tried it.

Lemon Meringue Cake - Lemon meringue is my all-time favorite pie, and like Rose, I have often imagined seeing it transformed into a cake. (Monica earned a proposal for this one!)

The Bostini - Not only because this dessert is a San Francisco classic (pastry chef Kurtis Baguley had it written into his contract with Scala's that the recipe followed him) but because orange chiffon, pastry cream, and ganache glaze sounds like heaven.

Apple Caramel Charlotte - I can admit it. I just want to do this one because it looks really hard. There are SEVEN pages of instructions.

November 07, 2010

When you have known someone since kindergarten, and you are lucky enough to still live close to each other and enjoy each other's company as adults, the moment you are told they are pregnant is like an electric shock to your system. The buzz and the excitement hummed even then, but I never imagined how much it would affect me seeing my friend change before my very eyes, or feeling the baby kick for the first time. I can only describe the kick as feeling like my palm was inside a drum, pressed up against the top, and the baby's leg was the drumstick making contact. Human bodies are amazing. As these things go, we broke out the fancy teacups and showered her with love and other things yesterday, and I was sure glad that the Heavenly Bakers roster gave me the chance to make the Swedish Pear and Almond Cream Cake for the guest of honor.

October 27, 2010

I love that this tart looks like a flying saucer ready to descend on the Financial District below. Someone was actually holding this tart up for me to photograph it, but it's as if it's suspended there by the Power of Pastry, because no arm can be seen.

This year has been exceedingly packed with work and joyful events and a few trips, and as the fall settled in and got comfortable I got antsy to make the most of the rest of the year, and focus more on my own work. I was beginning to feel like the summer had whizzed by me, and with it the year, because doesn't everything from here feel like a slippery downhill?

Then I sat down to look through pictures from this summer, and time began to slow down. I think I understand what Shauna meant when she professed her love of escaping with photography to a "place without words." Those places are good for all of us to have. Even though I now look at my photos with a much more critical eye and see all the room for improvement after going to Blogher Food, I am also just happy to have captured moments over the summer I might have otherwise forgotten.

I will never forget when, after I had mourned missing sour cherry season, my friends stopped by one Sunday afternoon with a giant armful of sour cherries they had picked from a neglected tree, just so I could make pie. I am only sorry now that they didn't get to eat said pie. Thanks to Jennie Schacht, whose Deep-Dish Sour Cherry Pie had knocked me out at the Omnivore Books Pie Contest last year, I knew exactly which recipe to try. Always a lover of stone fruit (anything with a pit and soft flesh, including apricots, cherries, plums, nectarines, peaches and even avocado), I really savored baking this summer from her cookbookFarmers' Market Desserts.